OT: Are you a reader? What do you read?

I'm definitely a reader. Mostly fiction. A few of my favorites are Cat's Cradle, White Oleander, Memoirs of A Geisha, and Animal Farm.

I am also into non-fiction books on war history, and history in general.

One of my all time favorites is Moby Dick. Seriously. Sci-fi, history, Civil War, biographies, the classics.

Definitely

Malcom Gladwell

I read comic books and picture books.

If Nina had actually read "Animal Farm", and truly understood the satire and allegory, she would not be supporting Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. I'm calling bullshit on that one.

Not a reader but mainly out of laziness - I think it's a good-habit to have mainly that one can learn a lot & I like to learn (but have become lazy in my older mid-40s age) - I prefer nonfiction again mainly for the aspect of learning

Let's see... My library Most of Tom Clancy'a fiction and non- fiction from The Hunt for Red October through Rainbow Six, Submarine through Armored Cavalry; most of David Morrell's work, much of Richard Marcinko's earlier novels, including his autobiography; lots of Stephen King, especially The Dark Tower series, all of A Song of Ice and Fire to date; Einstein's Dreams, virtually everything Michael Crichton wrote, and many more I cannot remember offhand. Non-fiction: Strong Men Armed, 13 Hours in Benghazi, Black Hawk Down, Not a Good Day to Die, The Hot Zone, American Sniper, Sole Survivor, Command and Control, Evolutions End, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and The User Illusion found out my (remembered favorites). I must confess to one guilty pleasure: The Harry Potter series.

Most of you guys probably want believe me but I'm actually a big time Reader so much so I keep $500 in store credit at my local used book store. Basically use the place like the library lpl

I just read tech manuals. I rarely find a book that keeps my attention, Hitch Hikers guide.

I read mostly fiction, James Patterson, Michael Baldacci, John Sanford, Jeffrey Deaver, and Robert Parker are some of my favorite authors. I try to read 30 books per year.

Animal Farm may seem like it pertains to a Communist regime. But there are other ways of seeing it. The work in this country is done by lots and lots of people, but rarely are they the ones who get the benefit and recognition. What has emerged, especially since progressive income tax has been gutted, is this layer of financial speculators. So you could say that just like in Animal Farm, these pigs have taken over, and they keep finding new ways to legitimate their hold on power.

But certainly Hillary Clinton and her conservative wing of the Democratic Party are not like this. She has always operated by going after conservative voters, going to the Right of Obama in 2008. The problem with her is that she is extremely non-liberal.

I've posted links to zillions of book. Most always non-fiction. Right now finishing up with:

amazon.com

Then to read: amazon.com

SJG

If you like total fantasy and the minds of sociopaths and cult leaders, here's a snippet from SJG......

Then as far as my fledgling organization, we will have our own ongoing education and our own leadership in multiple technology industries. Our men and some of the women will be kept busy there. And then all of our men will also be kept busy getting fucked and sucked dry each day by stripper grade hotties, plus sometimes also bedding down with them.

But we don't send our women out to service outside people. And we never get money that way either. As many will have come from Strip Clubs and AMPs, they may still do what they do, but we don't involve ourselves in that, or get any of the money. The ones who live on our premises will have retired from such commercial practices. We don't have anything to do with promoting any form of prostitution, and we never get money from anything like that.

As far as influencing politics though, we certainly won't want to be calming people down. We will be organizing people so that they can make revolution and be effective. Just common crime and violence are not effective.

We will be getting people to totally reject alcohol, drugs, born again christianity, and psychiatric medications, and instead to work with us and start re-educating themselves, and to become politically conscious so they can file lawsuits against past abusers. For people who have had children in order to scapegoat and use them, we will be their worst nightmare, as they will be held accountable. And then the psychiatric system is going to get shredded, and the evangelical churches will be torn to pieces too.

And then as people who reject things like born again christianity and psychiatric medications and the self-reliance ethic are able to politically organize, we will be able to steer the overall politics way to the left, so that probably things come to resemble Sweden or the French Socialist Party.

Mikeya02, it might surprise you to learn that lots and lots of people have build communities. And some of these have been built on sexual openness.

Here is a directory. This used to be paper only, but now it is online.

ic.org

Map: ic.org

Mikeya02, what is the most coercive and gives the government the most power to control people in how they live does indeed seem to be this Libertarian Anti-Government Movement.

And then you take this further, saying that anyone who does not go along is a "sociopath".

What is an issue though is that most of these Intentional Communities don't last beyond the lives of their founders. That is, unless you also include Roman Catholic and Buddhist celibate communities. Those have lasted a long time, and with any end no where in sight.

One community which was anything but celibate which certainly attracted huge numbers was that of the Bagwan Shree Rajneesh. But his group never really worked once it left India. And it did turn into a dangerous cult.

Today something of it still survives though, back in India.

People are always giving up large degrees of arbitrary freedom in order to make these things work. But then, some are very happy in such groups. It all depends.

Keeping up with the Joneses and social conformity are all consumptive, and not everyone wants that to be all their life is about.

SJG

One of my favorite authors was Robert Bloch (Psycho). His short stories were my favorites. He liked puns and twist endings. A quote of his...

"I have the heart of a small boy. It's in a jar on my desk"

I've read a lot of Robert Bloch. Great stuff.

I mostly like legal thrillers and crime novels. I love John Sandford and "the prey" series. Don't like his other stuff. I think I've read all of Michael Crichton's books. I sure miss him. And I enjoy Ken Follett, particularly his historical novels.

For psychopathic horror and crime forensics, Michael Slade wrote some doozies

I'm not happy unless I have a good book to read. I read fiction and non-fiction.

I read primarily crime fiction these days, I have always enjoyed science fiction with authors very much in quantity.

Long ago, I read Mein Kamph. A very disturbing look into Hitler's psyche.

Remember the ace paperbacks of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard ( Tarzan, Conan, A Princess Of Mars....), featuring the art of Frank Frazetta? I used to have them all.

Besides many newspapers and magazines (political, news, science, investment, travel), I read lots of books, though the number has declined in recent years from one a week to one or two a month due to work, travel, movies, and (of course) strip clubs. Stereotypically men read mostly nonfiction and women read mostly fiction, but my reading tends to be half and half. In fiction I like classics (Dickens, Eliot, Twain, Wharton, . . .), science fiction (Heinlein, Asimov, Dick, Ellison, . . .) and other speculative fiction such as Huxley ("Brave New World"), Orwell ("1984"), C.S. Lewis (the Perelandra trilogy), and Tolkien (everything!). In nonfiction I read widely in economics, political science, sociology, public policy, and science, among others. The last two books I read were "Silas Marner" by George Eliot and "Crunchy Cons" by Rod Dreher. Currently I'm reading a Stephen King horror novel from the 80s called "The Dark Half".

Even though the topic of this discussion is what we read, I can't let the following asinine statements by SJG go unanswered:

"Animal Farm may seem like it pertains to a Communist regime. But there are other ways of seeing it. . . .So you could say that just like in Animal Farm, these pigs [i.e. financial speculator] have taken over, and they keep finding new ways to legitimate their hold on power." -- NO. Animal Farm is clearly about the abuses of totalitarianism, whether it be Nazism or Communism. Orwell, who famously is conservatives' favorite socialist, was a defender of individual freedom who hated any form of totalitarianism and wrote about it in this great work.

" . . . especially since progressive income tax has been gutted . . . " -- NO. Though the top federal rate is "only* 39.6%, this ignores the facts that (a) many tax credits and deductions are phased out for the rich and (b) several high-tax states such as California and New York with top state rates of 10-12%, rich people pay an effective rate of 50-60% on their marginal dollar. Only an extreme leftist would find it fair that anyone should pay a marginal rate of over 50%!

"But certainly Hillary Clinton and her conservative wing of the Democratic Party are not like this. She has always operated by going after conservative voters, going to the Right of Obama in 2008. The problem with her is that she is extremely non-liberal." -- NO. Being a warmonger and in the pocket of Wall Street does not make Hillary a conservative by any stretch of the imagination. Also, running to the right of Obama in the 2008 primaries (though not on health care!) wasn't very hard to do . . . except in the wild imaginations of extreme leftists.

But certainly Hillary Clinton and her conservative wing of the Democratic Party are not like this. She has always operated by going after conservative voters, going to the Right of Obama in 2008. The problem with her is that she is extremely non-liberal.

I read mostly non-fiction, biographies, and revolutionary war books.

As far as fiction I'm a big Cormac McCarthy fan, Blood Meridien is probably my favorite fiction book.

Thanks for the snippet from SJG, mikey! Quotes like the following do strike me as sociopathic:

" . . . we certainly won't want to be calming people down. We will be organizing people so that they can make revolution and be effective."

"We will be getting people to totally reject alcohol, drugs, born again christianity, and psychiatric medications . . . and then the psychiatric system is going to get shredded, and the evangelical churches will be torn to pieces too."

" And then as people who reject things like born again christianity and psychiatric medications and the self-reliance ethic are able to politically organize, we will be able to steer the overall politics way to the left, so that probably things come to resemble Sweden or the French Socialist Party."

Elsewhere in his copious postings one can find multiple references to feeding Christians to lions.

When I was a freshman in high school (mid 1970's), the English department "modernized" the curriculum. They did away with standardized classes that previous generations of students took. They replaced those classes with over 20 different themed classes with titles such as Super Heroes, Science Fiction, English Literature, and Sports, Instead of reading Steinbeck, I read Robert Heinlein. I didn't read all the staples of America High School such as To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice & Men, or Moby Dick.

Then in college, I took one class in English Composition. I did not have a liberal arts education. I took calculus and differential equations and linear algebra.

After college I just wanted to reading light novels. But lately I've been felling like I missed something. I bought a whole set of Steinbeck books at a garage sale. I'm trying to read them - but they're dry after being used to John Grisham.

Non-fiction. Whatever I'm interested in at the moment.

I read reviews of different clubs.

gammanu, bring back my bookshelf, lol. To that list I would add Stephen Coontz (Flight of the Intruder, The Red Horseman, etc) and the Bourne series. Also Passagemaker and Fine Woodworking from the magazine world.

For fun reads, I like military sci-fi authors like Weber, Ringo and Flint. I also read history (political - military - social and religious), technology, and physics books (even textbooks). Since I read very fast, I usually read five to ten books a week, I also read mysteries, fantasy, translated novels (believe me - the Russian "greats" are all too long and very boring no matter who translates), I even read a few romance novels when I was stuck in a hospital bed after an emergency surgery with nothing else to read.

I've read many hundreds of books, including the complete works of John LeCarre, Terry Pratchett, John Irving, Ken Follett, Brian Greene, Michio Kaku, plus a few others.

ATACdawg: I read two or three books in Coontz's Jake Grafton series, starting with Flight of the Intruder. It was all right, but didn't hold my lasting interest. I read The Bourne Identity, and loved it. It was perfectly set against the backdrop of the late Cold War and mercenary terrorists. Because of that, I hated the first movie and never cared for the sequels, except for Jeremy Renner's The Bourne Legacy. Another book where the novel was totally trashed and betrayed by the film: World War Z. An incredibly creative and engrossing storytelling, and the movie had nothing - NOTHING- in common with the book. Even standalone, the movie sucked. If the virus kills and reanimates, then WTF does it care if you're sick?! Fuck you Brad Pitt!! You bought the rights to a great book and made a shitty film, and now any real filmmakers can't make any decent films from it. Fury sucked, too. Seriously, what an ass. Worst film from a novel E.V.E.R. Sorry, I take good books seriously. You know whose novels always suck? Clive Cussler. What a fucking moron. McConaughey can make as many Dirk Pitt movies as he wants.

Mr. Deuce, the oppressive movement which we face in the US today is the Libertarian Anti-Government Movement. It demands social conformity, and it maintains for the government huge powers. You just don't see it, but you advance it.

Tax rates are much lower than they were during the country's period of strongest growth and greatest gains for working people, the Eisenhower - Kennedy era. And this makes sense as downward wealth transfers cause the money to circulate the fastest. Even Henry Ford had accepted that for this reason it was better to pay workers more.

Hillary ran pitching to conservatives. She was going into suburbs and often going after Roman Catholic voters, as they are usually a key swing vote. There were not the urban and low income voters who actually need to be brought back in. Hillary really gave Obama a run for his money. But after she was out, Biden became known as "Ambassador to Hillary Clinton Land."

Capitalism used to get its scapegoats in the immigrants and racial minorities used to do cheap labor and slave labor. As the need for labor is much less, but the need for scapegoats to keep the system in place is much higher, now Capitalism gets it scapegoats from the Middle-Class Family itself.

So we have a huge untouchable caste ( not anything like a class ) that lives on alcohol, drugs, born again christianity, and psychiatric medications. It is because these people have subsumed the self-reliance ethic, derived from original sin, that they are unable to organize and act.

In 1848 Marx said that the Lumpen Proletariat lacked political consciousness. That was how it looked to him. But 100 years later in Algeria, Frantz Fanon described the Lumpen Proletariat as Drug Dealers, Petty Thieves, Prostitutes, and Pimps, who lived on the perimeters of cities in shanty towns. They had been rejected from family and clan because of the ravages and dislocations of Capitalism. This is exactly how it is in San Jose California today. But Fanon said that the lumpens can indeed have political consciousness, and they can cause great disruption, which advances revolution.

I'm sure this is true. But what stops it are alcohol, drugs, born again christianity, and psychiatric medication, all being used to back up the self-reliance ethic, and to further harm our society's scapegoats.

Mr. Deuce, it is you and Mikeya02 who are sociopathic, inventing reasons why things should stay as they are, and demanding social conformity and deciding who is legitimate and who is not, and opposing what efforts are already being made for people to advance themselves.

SJG

Jeff Healey Band - "The Thrill Is Gone" - 10-09-03 - Toronto, Canada youtube.com

More Books: tuscl.net

I haven't read Animal Farm in so many years, but I still remember Napoleon always saying things like "I'm carrying important documents and such" (idk if that's the exact quote) and just imagining a lil pig scurrying away with documents is still a funny image in my mind.

The book's last sentence is one of my faves of all the books I've read.

Mostly non fiction. Lots of sports books and lots of books about heavy metal. I used to have a lot of books about the ancient world, but I lost interest in that for the time being. I've taken to reading history in recent years.

"The Hermetic Deleuze" Philosophy and Spiritual Quest by Joshua Ramey Duke University Press, 2012

book looks extremely interesting, but it is still not very well disseminated.

SJG

Shinedown - Second Chance [OFFICIAL VIDEO] youtube.com